{"id":28342,"date":"2012-10-04T20:01:48","date_gmt":"2012-10-05T00:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=28342"},"modified":"2012-10-05T12:00:49","modified_gmt":"2012-10-05T16:00:49","slug":"an-editorial-shell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2012\/10\/04\/an-editorial-shell\/","title":{"rendered":"an editorial shell…"},"content":{"rendered":"
Finding the actual data from Study 329 posted in early August was invigorating [a movement…<\/font><\/u><\/a><\/strong>]. I could finally have a go at looking at the things I’d only been able to guess about before. For example, I knew that the authors of that Study had abandoned a primary outcome parameter [HAM-D either ≤50% baseline or<\/u> HAM-D ≤8<\/font><\/strong> @ 8 weeks<\/font><\/strong>] and introduced another [HAM-D ≤8<\/font><\/strong> @ 8 weeks<\/font><\/strong>]. It must’ve been because it looked better, but I didn’t know why. With the data available, it was easy to see:<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The 8 week value with their newly constructed parameter [circled far right] was an outlier<\/em> and made the difference look a whole lot more like what they wanted to see [wanted us to see]. And there were numerous other examples of what Neuroskeptic aptly calls the dark arts<\/font><\/strong><\/em>. I’ve kind of been on a data transparency high since I found that data. Not that I wasn’t there before, but now it seems more like an imperative. Thinking about Neuroskeptic’s analysis in the last post, falsifying or fabricating<\/font><\/strong> data is outright fraud<\/font><\/strong>, a crime. But the mis-use of the tools of science or other artifice in constructing an article is what he called questionable practices<\/font><\/strong>, all of which come after the fact<\/em> and would be easily detected if we had the facts in hand<\/em>. So the solution is posting the raw data and looking at the article itself as what it really is, an editorial shell around it [as opposed to hiding the data behind the article]: <\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
I don’t know if that would be necessary for every scientific paper, but history tells us that, for sure, it is the right thing to do for clinical trials in profit yielding psychopharmacologic drugs. We’ve had decades of the alternative and it has come to no good. I do have a question about the clinicaltrials.gov results database<\/font><\/strong> being up to the task of true data transparency. A few weeks back, I started to look into it…<\/div>\n